It’s not every day that the high-profile athletes are spotted using self storage products on camera–in this case, self-storage boxes.
Fresh off a nail-biting NBA title win, Miami Heat players were recently photographed packing their locker-room belongings into a local Miami Self Storage company’s boxes for safekeeping during the off-season. The Company is named Safeguard (an American based self storage company) and for their marketing department, this was a dream come true.
The Heat roster features three of the highest-paid athletes in the world. LeBron James nets $42 million every year in endorsements alone, making him the NBA’s biggest endorsement star and the world’s fourth highest paid athlete. King James has deals with Samsung, Coca-Cola, Nike and McDonald’s, just to name a few. Dwayne Wade is no slouch himself, pulling in $11.5 million from endorsements. Even Chris Bosh rakes in more than $1 million a year just from endorsement deals.
Now, to be fair, the big three aren’t visible in either photograph, but the photo above clearly features Mike Miller, Shane Battier and Norris Cole, all of whom logged a ton of court time during the NBA Finals. Despite the graininess of the image, most die-hard Heat fans can identify the players in the picture below. For instance, it looks like Juwan Howard is in the light blue.
According to people at Safeguard this timely publicity opportunity was neither planned nor staged. Turns out the equipment director for the Heat actually rents a storage unit from them and when the players asked for boxes at the end of the season, he turned to the place he rents storage from.
Aside from tweets and a Facebook post, Safeguard doesn’t plan to use these images in promotional materials. There are probably all kinds of legal reasons why they can’t, but I don’t think there is anything that says they can’t at least enlarge, frame and hang these images in Safeguard’s corporate office, as well as inside all of the Safeguard storage facilities in the Miami area?
I can guarantee you this…If these pictures were of the Toronto Maple Leafs and they were using Planet Storage stuff, you can bet your last dollar we would be doing everything we could to parlay their popularity into our marketing campaign!!!
Come to think of it. I’m going to talk to my boss right now! There’s gotta be a way we can get them to use Planet Storage!
Planet Storage 